Before Taliban

Introduction / 19
the Kingdom of Afghanistan from 1880 to 1901. I used these three figures
to personify the traditional moral imperatives of honor, Islam, and state
governance, and I argued that the development of a coherent and stable
political culture was impeded throughout the century just past by the coexistence
of these three competitive and contentious spheres of belief and
practice. Here again, I look at the lives of three men—this time individuals
who played important roles in the present conflict and who personify contemporary
transformations in Afghan understandings of honor, Islam, and
state rule as they developed in and through the critical first years after the
revolution of 1978.
Contemporary understandings of honor, Islam, and rule bear similarities
to the forms that prevailed at the turn of the previous century, but they have
also changed in many ways, largely as a result of the ideological currents that
have swept into Afghanistan from abroad periodically since the time of King
Amanullah. One of the leaders whose life is examined in this book—Nur
Muhammad Taraki, the founder of the Marxist People’s Democratic Party of
Afghanistan—played a pivotal role in initiating the revolutionary political
culture. The other two—Samiullah Safi, who was a leader of one of the first
tribal uprisings against the Marxist regime, and Qazi Muhammad Amin, the
deputy amir of the Hizb-i Islami party, which, along with several other
Islamic political parties, took control of the antigovernment uprisings and
effectively “Islamicized” the resistance—both came of age during the tumultuous
period of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
As befits the present age, the figures at the center of this book cannot be
called heroes—at least not in the sense that I used the term to describe the
men whose lives I examined in my earlier book. These men all played pivotal
roles at crucial stages of the current conflict, but they are not largerthan-life
figures the way Sultan Muhammad Khan, Amir Abdur Rahman,
and the Mulla of Hadda were. They are instead men in-between who, as
much as they helped shape the events of their time, also got caught up in
and eventually pulled down in the backwash of those events. The men
whose lives are described and interpreted in this book failed in their purposes.
The revolution, uprising, and jihad that they separately supported all
ultimately collapsed. But it is because of this failure that I find their stories
useful to tell, for ultimately the story of the war in Afghanistan is not the
story of success, despite the momentous achievement of defeating and helping
to topple a global superpower. It is rather the story of a series of ill-conceived,
though fateful, attempts to define what Afghanistan stood for and to
make Afghanistan cohere as a nation in ways different from the ways it had
cohered in the past.